The US stock market watchdog has not yet announced its official stance on the status of BTC and ETH. The Senior Legal Counsel of the SEC did not exclude the possibility that Ether can even now be categorized as a security.
In a conference with Justice Sarah Netburn, Dugan Bliss stressed that the watchdog has yet to make any formal declarations on the status of the leading cryptocurrencies.
“I want to be clear that this is my personal understanding of the existing situation. I do not want to be too picky, but the SEC itself, in my understanding, has not yet revealed an official position. No explicit action has been undertaken to assert that Bitcoin and Ether do not represent securities,” Bliss noted.
Previous SEC chairman Jay Clayton has repetitively stated that Bitcoin does not represent security. Nevertheless, in a note to the Cipher Technologies Bitcoin Fund from October 2019, the SEC denied a request to register an investment company on the basis (among other things) that BTC, in fact, represents security.
Ether has been even less often cited by representatives of the watchdog in this regard. Still, in 2019, Jay Clayton stated that Ether and similar cryptocurrencies could potentially drop their status as securities as time goes on. Back in 2018, the chief of the corporate finance division of the SEC, William Hinman, further argued that the decentralized composition of the Ethereum network does not make it possible for the appropriate application of existing securities laws on the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, Bliss claims that Hinman’s opinion does not unavoidably reflect the regulator’s standpoint on the legal status of ETH:
“Recently a senior SEC official had a conversation in which he expressed his personal opinion. Yet, there are no official documents or any measures that would make it clear to determine with certainty what position the SEC holds on this matter.”
We remind that in the context of the lawsuit initiated by the SEC against Ripple Lab. and its founders, the legal team of the defendants issued an inquiry into internal SEC documentation to establish the viewpoint of the Commission on the legal status of the regulator regarding the XRP token over time.
